Tag Archives: links

A friend of mine recently hooked me up to the Sillicon Alley Insider and more specifically their Chart of the Day. If you’re a bit of an infographics freak, as I am, then you’ll probably enjoy it. But it’s also a really useful resource for anyone who needs to understand what’s going on in the digital world.

I found the chart from Tuesday 21st (I know, I know, I’m way off the pace!) particularly interesting:

As we all know, the power behind the social web is the ability to share content, and it’s therefore crucial for any social network’s long-term viability that users are sharing. This chart shows that more people currently use Facebook to share links than anyone else. Not surprising given that Facebook is the size of a large country (I think it works out at around the 5th most populous). What is interesting is that Twitter, despite having only around one tenth the users of Facebook, is used by half as many people to share content. So (unless my thinking is flawed here), Twitter lends itself more readily to sharing.

There are a couple of points to consider, mostly centred around the fact that the AddToAny tool used to measure the data is biased toward certain web properties. Technorati’s top 5 most influential blogs don’t use the AddToAny widget and so aren’t included in the report, and the figures for email are not recorded accurately. There is also the fact that Yahoo owns a number of the spaces on the chart, and if combines would be second largest.

But even given these objections, I find the chart interesting. I’d actually like to see a chart that shows sharing as a proportion of the number of users – then we could really see the champion space for sharing. Any chance of that, Chart Of The Day?